Faith versus Individual Rights (of Children)

For a few days I’ve mulled over whether or not I should comment on this story:

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

The boy’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, is shaping up as prosecutors’ star witness against a 40-year-old Baltimore woman named Queen Antoinette. Prosecutors allege that Queen Antoinette led a small cult, called One Mind Ministries, based in a West Baltimore rowhouse. In early 2007, prosecutors say, Queen Antoinette instructed Ramkissoon and others to deprive Javon of food and water because he didn’t say “amen” before breakfast.

I’m inclined to make a comparison to infant circumcision for religious reasons. It’s easy to make even though there are many steps between the two points, but I worried about the perception that I’m claiming a moral equivalence between circumcision and death. I am not, so I stayed away. Then I read this entry by Rogier van Bakel, which I think gets the angle correct (emphasis in original):

Yeah, no insanity there. I mean, since she felt compelled by God to let her baby die a drawn-out, miserable death, why would anyone question her mental capacity? That just wouldn’t be respectful to the Big Guy, and to people of faith, now would it?

I’m more or less agnostic on religion, and I don’t care what people believe. My only concern is how our civil government uses religion as a guidance on rules. Specifically, I’m concerned about how government treats what one person does to another in the name of religious faith.

This case demonstrates that we collectively believe our government must not rebuke religious intent in individuals who inflict objectively harmful practices on another. And we must punish only the most egregious examples. In America, belief in a higher being is a sign of increased rationality. We mistakenly accept that parents may undertake certain unjustifiable actions against their children because we do not wish to imply that the verifiable is superior to the unverifiable. That is wrong.

This case is obvious, so the deference to religion in pursuit of convictions is understandable, if not entirely acceptable. The mother is obviously incompetent, so we shouldn’t pretend that she is. That will only perpetuate further violations of the rights of children because it gives religious justifications credibility they do not deserve.

Has the free market failed?

Andrew Sullivan posted this letter from a reader about problems with the private market for health insurance.

I’m one of the 40+ million Americas that the market has efficiently removed from health care rolls. I was laid off from a corporate job and make ends meet with freelance work while I job hunt in this rather difficult job market.

I bought a private policy — because COBRA was twice as expensive — a year or so ago from the company that held my employer-sponsored plan (rhymes with Clue Loss / Rue Field). I figured this would make continuity of prescriptions and care pretty straightforward, and instead found, when I went to the pharmacy, that those carry-over prescriptions were no longer covered, because my seasonal allergies were now a pre-existing condition. Yes, it’s true that leaving health care in private hands reduces political corruption, but there’s one thing that I’ve seen happen with long term political corruption: indictments. You don’t see that too much with corporate corruption, do you?

I see the point that there’s a problem, but this is an issue of distorted incentives. The government started the process by taxing income to the point where employer-subsidized health insurance became a rational perk. This has lingered to the current day. If insurance had remained an individual decision, would the market produce this result? Assuming the individual could still afford the premiums upon losing a job, a separate issue, it’s logical to assume that there would be no reason to change insurance plans when losing a job. The tax/regulatory structure created by generations of politicians produced a system weaker than it would otherwise be. Why should anyone believe that further government intervention would solve the problem better than government retreat?

More Spending Increases for the Non-Rich?

The Washington Post makes the same mistake in an editorial that I criticized on Tuesday.

AT A TIME of soaring deficits and growing needs, the Senate is weighing whether the wealthiest of wealthy Americans should get a tax break worth some $250 billion over 10 years. …

If you guess that there’s no discussion of not spending so much money, or even an explanation of growing needs, you’ll be correct. Even though the Post’s editors tell us this tax “would hardly be punitive”, they justify themselves by saying “[w]hy in the world should these folks get more of a tax cut?”. Perhaps we should consider the idea that our government should treat everyone equally rather than picking a politically-convenient minority to act as the nation’s ATM-of-last-resort.

Not that we should be surprised. The editors conclude the first paragraph with this:

… aren’t there better uses of hundreds of billions of dollars than reducing taxes even further for the tiny sliver of Americans subject to the estate tax?

Who gets to decide what better uses exist? Those who have the money (that was already taxed as income in some form)? Or those who vote to take it from them? This is a test of whether or not one believes that central planning is more effective and more legitimate than individual choices. I do not think it is, on either front.

Nor am I convinced by the Post’s evidence-free implication that lower estate taxes will harm charities. Such social engineering is hardly justified, even if the Post offered convincing evidence. What people do with their property is their business alone. But our history is full of examples of the wealthy leaving their estates to philanthropic ventures rather than leaving their heirs with every remaining penny they saved.